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Category Archives: Open discussion
A Nice Example Related to the Frankl Conjecture
Updates: 1. Peter Frankl brought to my attention that the very same example appeared in a paper by Dynkin and Frankl “Extremal sets of subsets satisfying conditions induced by a graph“. 2. Sam Hopkins gave a lovely reference to Ravi … Continue reading
Possible future Polymath projects (2009, 2021)
What will be our next polymath project? A polymath project (Wikipedia) is a collaboration among mathematicians to solve important and difficult mathematical problems by coordinating many mathematicians to communicate with each other on finding the best route to the solution. … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Mathematics over the Internet, Open discussion
Tagged polymath, Polymath proposals, Tim Gowers
32 Comments
Avi Wigderson’s: “Integrating computational modeling, algorithms, and complexity into theories of nature, marks a new scientific revolution!” (An invitation for a discussion.)
The cover of Avi Wigderson’s book “Mathematics and computation” as was first exposed to the public in Avi’s Knuth Prize videotaped lecture. (I had trouble with 3 of the words: What is EGDE L WONK 0? what is GCAAG?GTAACTC … Continue reading
Answer to TYI 37: Arithmetic Progressions in 3D Brownian Motion
Consider a Brownian motion in three dimensional space. We asked (TYI 37) What is the largest number of points on the path described by the motion which form an arithmetic progression? (Namely, , so that all are equal.) Here is … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Open discussion, Probability
Tagged Brownian motion, Gady Kozma, Itai Benjamini
1 Comment
Are Natural Mathematical Problems Bad Problems?
One unique aspect of the conference “Visions in Mathematics Towards 2000” (see the previous post) was that there were several discussion sessions where speakers and other participants presented some thoughts about mathematics (or some specific areas), discussed and argued. In … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Conferences, Open discussion, What is Mathematics
Tagged Misha Gromov
5 Comments
Is it Legitimate/Ethical for Google to close Google+?
Update April 2, 2019: the links below are not working anymore. Google Plus is a nice social platform with tens of millions participants. I found it especially nice for scientific posts, e.g. by John Baez, Moshe Vardi, or about symplectic … Continue reading
10 Milestones in the History of Mathematics according to Nati and Me
Breaking news: David Harvey and Joris Van Der Hoeven. Integer multiplication in time O(nlogn). 2019. (I heard about it from Yoni Rozenshein on FB (חפירות על מתמטיקה); update GLL post. ) _____ Update: There were many interesting comments here and … Continue reading
Why is Mathematics Possible: Tim Gowers’s Take on the Matter
In a previous post I mentioned the question of why is mathematics possible. Among the interesting comments to the post, here is a comment by Tim Gowers: “Maybe the following would be a way of rephrasing your question. We know … Continue reading
Posted in Open discussion, Philosophy, What is Mathematics
Tagged Foundations of Mathematics, Open discussion, Philosophy, Tim Gowers
22 Comments
Why is mathematics possible?
Spectacular advances in number theory Last weeks we heard about two spectacular results in number theory. As announced in Nature, Yitang Zhang proved that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes which are at most 70 million apart! This is a sensational achievement. … Continue reading
Polymath Reflections
Polymath is a collective open way of doing mathematics. It started over Gowers’s blog with the polymath1 project that was devoted to the Density Hales Jewett problem. Since then we had Polymath2 related to Tsirelson spaces in Banach space theory , an intensive Polymath4 devoted … Continue reading
Combinatorics and more 